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New Waze for GPS Navigation

New Waze for GPS Navigation

Author

12/30/2010

GPS navigation was a great invention that severely hindered my navigation skills but, hey, who needs that when you have GPS? Although incredibly useful it does have some faults. I know whenever I have someone come to my house for the first time I have to run out into the middle of the street to flag them down because my address shows up 2 blocks over. The real time traffic updates aren’t very accurate, some streets are wrong, and the reminisce of the suction cup make my car a target to break into. Despite these faults we have not seen many game changing updates to navigation systems besides aesthetics and different features. What if navigation were user generated built on top of the existing GPS.

A startup, Waze has created just that.

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. – Waze.com

The way Waze works (try saying that three times fast) is you simply just keep the Waze mobile application, available on many platforms, open and drive. You will receive updates from other Waze users for example if someone is in front of you in bumper to bumper traffic, you will be able to see that and take an alternate route. If you are feeling particularly kind hearted you can give updates as you see them such as an accident, construction or even a speed trap and help those who are traveling the same path. You can also report errors on the map or incorrect street addresses. Once your application syncs with the Waze center it will update the map for everyone.

The more people that join the Waze community the more accurate the application will be, resulting in a superior GPS navigation system. The fact that users can give updates will fine tune any inaccuracies that GPS satellites did not pickup. There will be no more slowly creeping up and down a block to find the right street address or driving into traffic. I think once Waze builds a large enough community they would even benefit from creating a portable GPS system. The startup Waze offers a great solution to errors on a widely used system/product. Everyone go download Waze so we can all have a perfect GPS navigation system!